A work in progress

Dusk start­ed out as a way for me to wrap my head around the lat­est tech­niques for build­ing web­sites. It is pri­mar­i­ly a port­fo­lio site but it is also much more, a lit­tle back sto­ry first.

In a pre­vi­ous post I got a lit­tle heavy about where I’ve been and what has been hap­pen­ing in my life for the past 6 years. It also touched on some places that I’ve worked at, the pri­ma­ry one being HP. While I was work­ing at HP — 4 years total — there wasn’t real­ly much time for try­ing out the lat­est advances in web devel­op­ment, I was hav­ing to build and man­age web­sites using Dreamweaver tem­plates… from 2009 right up until I left in 2012. The sites had to work in Inter­net Explor­er 6 and be view-able on mon­i­tors with a res­o­lu­tion of 1024 x 768 or high­er, the lat­ter wasn’t too much of an issue but the for­mer, ouch! that was a roy­al pain in the ass. And I knew about it when a site didn’t work in Inter­net Explor­er 6 because a large por­tion of peo­ple inter­nal­ly were still run­ning Win­dows XP with IE6. There was no room to intro­duce any new CSS or even much JavaScript into the tem­plates, every­thing was locked down, pre­scribed and corporate.

So why didn’t I just work on my own projects in the evenings and week­ends then? That would of been a good way to stay up-to-date with the lat­est tech­niques of web devel­op­ment and this could of worked. I tried a few times but there was one major road block, Cal­i­for­nia is 9 hours behind Sweden/​Norway. This meant more often than not I was stay­ing up until 10pm on con­fer­ence calls, a down­side of work­ing from home in a for­eign coun­try I guess. And those Amer­i­cans sure do like con­fer­ence calls too, some weeks would see 4 con­fer­ence calls sched­uled, each on a dif­fer­ent night and each last­ing at least 1 hour. Who feels like being cre­ative and try­ing out new devel­op­ment tech­niques after that? I sure as hell didn’t. By the time the week­ends rolled around all I want­ed to do was leave the house and go hik­ing, which I did. This was great for my pho­tog­ra­phy but not so great for my web devel­op­ment skills. There were oth­er things also, like mov­ing coun­tries three sep­a­rate times and every­thing that comes with that, hav­ing a child, try­ing to learn for­eign lan­guages… plus plen­ty more.

This might sound like one big giant excuse. I should know JavaScript inside out, my HTML should be 5, all my CSS should be writ­ten using pre­proces­sors and I should be using task-run­ners to mini­fy, con­cate­nate, pre­process, opti­mize, test and lint all of the above.

I’m work­ing on it.

Dusk is about me get­ting up to speed and try­ing out these new tech­niques and ideas. I have already picked up on using SASS (CSS pre­pro­cess­ing), using CSS3 fea­tures and struc­tur­ing my markup using HTML5 ele­ments. After liv­ing under a rock these past 6 years I am super excit­ed to final­ly have the desire to learn again. So much so that I have start­ed doing online cours­es to learn more about design also. While they can­not com­pete with a bach­e­lor degree in design, it’s some­thing for while I’m liv­ing in Nor­way. I have also start­ed work on ver­sion 2 of this site. It’s a work in progress!